Katja Seib

Katja Seib (1989, Düsseldorf) graduated from the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie with an MFA in painting in early 2016.

The artist paints on jute canvases, which she smooths with layers of glue and gesso before applying thick paint. The result is a very thick, rough canvas, and this type of support allows her to imbue a narrative dimension into her works starting from the preparatory phase. She creates pieces that are both familiar and strange, combining a subtle interplay of texture and image with skillful brushwork and meticulous attention to detail.

The narrative quality is strongly present in Katja Seib's works, where it appears that a story unfolds across the surfaces, akin to the pages of a novel, often imbued with autobiographical flavor or an almost cinematic rhythm.

The artist invites friends or acquaintances to pose for her works or for photographs that serve as a basis for her paintings. She strives to adhere to their real appearance but often alters the color of their skin, rendering it blue, purple, gray, or red; this fusion of real and dreamlike elements seems to speak of her personal experiences and intimate stories. According to Katja, “Dreaming is equivalent to being free. In our dreams, we have the freedom to create our intimate comfort zone, where we can enter and be whoever we want to be.”

Just as in a dream, one can trace symbols in her works that prompt the viewer to seek their own interpretative key. The artist plays on the delicate boundary between these two dimensions, between reality and dream, leveraging the fact that often what happens in reality seems unreal, while what occurs in dreams impresses upon us a sense of absolute truth. The work in the collection, Reality and Dream, is a portrait of a couple of Katja's friends living in Los Angeles: the artist Parker Ito and his wife Liv Barrett. In the painting, the two are engaged in a discussion, while above them, Cupid is aiming an arrow at his forehead. However, on the table between the couple, there is a reflection of them kissing… the portrait of a modern marriage.